The Ax (9 page)

This automated future was always presented as a good thing, a boon to mankind, but I remember, even as a child, wondering what was supposed to happen to the people who didn’t work at the dull stupefying jobs any more. They’d have to work somewhere, wouldn’t they? Or how would they eat? If the machines took all their jobs, what would they do to support themselves?

I remember the first time I saw news footage of a robot assembly line in a Japanese auto factory, a machine that looked like the X-ray machine in the dentist’s office, jerking around all by itself, this way and that, welding automobile pieces together. This was automation. It was fast, and although it looked clumsy the announcer said it was much more precise and efficient than any human being.

So automation did arrive, and it did have a hard effect on the workers. In the fifties and sixties, blue-collar workers were laid off in their thousands, all because of automation. But most of those workers were unionized, and most of the unions had grown strong over the previous thirty years, and so there were great long strikes, in the steel mills, and in the mines, and in the auto factories, and at the end of it all the pain of the transition was somewhat eased.

Well, that was long ago, and the toll that automation was going to take on the American worker has long since been absorbed. These days, the factory workers are only hit sporadically, when a company moves to Asia or somewhere, looking for cheaper labor and easier environment laws. These days, it’s the child of automation that has risen among us, and the child of automation hits higher in the work force.

The child of automation is the computer, and the computer is taking the place of the white-collar worker, the manager, the supervisor, just as surely as those assembly line robots took the place of the lunch-bucket crowd. Middle management, that’s what’s being winnowed now. And none of us are unionized.

In any large company, there are three levels of staff. At the top are the bosses, the executives, the representatives of the stockholders, who count the numbers and issue the orders and make the decisions. At the bottom are the workers on the line, the people who actually make whatever is being made. And between the two, until now, has been middle management.

It is middle management’s job to interpret the bosses for the workers and the workers for the bosses. The middle manager passes information: downward, he passes the orders and requirements, while upward he passes the record of accomplishment, of what has actually happened. To the suppliers he passes the information of what raw material is needed, and to the distributors he passes the information of what finished product is available. He’s the conduit, and until now he has been an absolutely necessary part of the process.

Once you bring in the computer, you no longer need middle management. Of course, you still need a
few
people at that level, to serve the computer, to run specific tasks, but you no longer need the hundreds and thousands of managers that were still needed only yesterday.

People like me.

As the computer takes our jobs, most people don’t even seem to realize why it’s happening. Why was I fired, they want to know, when the company’s in the black and doing better than ever? And the answer is, we were fired because the computer made us unnecessary and made mergers possible and our absence makes the company even stronger, and the dividends even larger, the return on investment even more generous.

They still need some of us. This is a transition we’re in now, where middle management will shrink like a slug when you pour salt on it, but middle management won’t completely disappear. There will just be fewer jobs, that’s all, far fewer jobs.

But
my
job, the one Upton “Ralph” Fallon is holding for me, that one still exists. A human being or two is still needed to run the production line, to be above the working stiffs but capable of communication with them, so the bosses won’t have to deal directly with people who play country music on their car radios.

Fallon is my competition, all right. And the six resumés I’ve pulled out of the stack are my competition. But this is a sea change taking place in our civilization right now, and
all
of middle management is my competition. A million hungry faces will be at the window soon, peering in. Well educated, middle-aged, middle class.

I have to be firmly in place, before the flood becomes overwhelming. So I have to be strong, and I have to be determined, and I have to be quick. Thursday, I have to drive into New York State and find Everett Boyd Dynes.

EVERETT B. DYNES

264 Nether St.

Lichgate, NY 14597

315 890-7711

EDUCATION: BA (Hist) Champlain College, Plattsburgh, NY

WORK HISTORY

I have worked in the paper industry for 22 years, in sales, design, customer relations and management. I have worked in the area of polymer paper specialized applications for 9 years, during which time I have dealt with customers and designers, and have also run a product line, where my responsibilities have included interfacing with design and production teams and being in charge of a 27-person production line crew.

EMPLOYMENT HISTORY

1986–present—Production line manager, Patriot Paper Corp.

1982–1986—Customer relations and some design, Green Valley Paper

1977–1982—Salesman, all product lines, Whitaker Paper Specialties

1973–1977—Salesman, industrial product lines, Patriot Paper Corp.

1971–1973—Salesman, Northeast Beverage Corp, Syracuse, NY

1968–1971—Infantryman, US Army, one tour in Vietnam

PERSONAL HISTORY

I am married, with three nearly-grown children. My wife and I are active in our church and our community. I have been a Boy Scout scoutmaster, when my son was of the appropriate age.

INTENTION

It is my hope to join a forward-looking paper company that can fully utilize my training and skills in all areas of paper production and sale.

The New York State Thruway is an expensive toll road. It goes north from New York City to Albany, then turns west toward Buffalo. In that western part, it runs along just to the south of the Mohawk River and the Erie Canal. Just to the north of river and canal is a state road, Route 5, which is smaller and curvier, but doesn’t cost anything. I am on Route 5.

I was never in Vietnam. Until I shot Herbert Everly, I’d never seen a human being dead because of violence. It irritates me that Dynes, old EBD, has to put right there, in his resumé, that he was in Vietnam. So what? Is the world supposed to owe him a living, a quarter of a century later? Is this special pleading?

I was stationed in Germany, in the Army, after I got out of boot camp. We were in a communications platoon in a small base east of Munich, on top of a tall pine-covered hill. A foothill of the Alps, I suppose it must have been. We didn’t have much to do except keep our radio equipment in working order, just in case the Russians ever attacked, which most of us believed wasn’t going to happen. So my eighteen months in the Army in Germany was spent mostly in a beer haze, down in Mootown, which some of us called Munich, I have no idea why.

Mootown. And while the guys in Vietnam called the kilometer a click—“We’re ten clicks from the border”—we in Germany were still calling them Ks— “We’re ten Ks from that nice gasthaus”—though the Vietnamese influence was getting to us, and Ks were becoming clicks in Europe as well. Nobody wanted to be in Vietnam, but everybody wanted to be thought of as having
been
in Vietnam.

Like this son of a bitch, EBD. Twenty-five years later, and he’s still playing that violin.

On a midmorning Thursday in May, there isn’t that much traffic on Route 5, and I’m making pretty good time. Not quite as good as the big trucks I can see from time to time across the river on the thruway, but good enough. The little towns along the way—Fort Johnson, Fonda, Palatine Bridge—slow me some, but not for long. And the scenery is beautiful, the river winding through the hills, gleaming in spring sun. It’s a nice day.

Mostly it’s just river, there to my left, but some of it is clearly manmade, or man altered, and that would be remnants of the old Erie Canal. New York State is bigger than most people realize, being a good three hundred miles across from Albany to Buffalo, and in the early days of our country this body of water to my left was the main access to the interior of the nation. Back before there was much by way of roads.

In those days, the big ships from Europe could come into New York Harbor, and steam up the Hudson as far as Albany, and off-load there. Then the riverboats and barges would take over, carrying goods and people on the Mohawk River and the Erie Canal over to Buffalo, where they could enter Lake Erie, and then travel across the Great Lakes all the way to Chicago or Michigan, and even take rivers southward and wind up on the Mississippi.

Some years ago, I was watching some special on TV, and the announcer described something as being a “transitional technology.” It was the railroads I think he was talking about. Something. And the idea seemed to be, a transitional technology was the cumbersome old way people used to do things before they got to the easy sensible way they do things now. And the further idea was, look how much time and effort and expense was put into something that was just a temporary stopgap; railroad bridges, canals.

But everything is a transitional technology, that’s what I’m beginning to figure out. Maybe that’s what makes it impossible sometimes. Two hundred years ago, people knew for certain they would die in the same world they were born into, and it had always been that way. But not any more. The world doesn’t just
change
these days, it upheaves, constantly. We’re like fleas living on a Dr. Jekyll who’s always in the middle of becoming Mr. Hyde.

I can’t change the circumstances of the world I live in. This is the hand I’ve been dealt, and there’s nothing I can do about it. All I can hope to do is play that hand better than anybody else. Whatever it takes.

At Utica, I take Route 8 north. It goes all the way to Watertown and the Canadian border, but I don’t. I stop at Lichgate.

A factory town on the Black River. Prosperity, and the factory, left this town a long time ago; more transitional technology. Who knows what used to be manufactured in that great brick pile of a building that molders now beside the river. The river itself is narrow but deep, and very black, and is crossed by a dozen small bridges, all of them at least sixty years old.

Bits of the ground floor of the old factory have been kept more or less alive, converted to shops—antique, coffee, card—and a county museum. People making believe they’re at work, now that there is no work.

My road atlas doesn’t include a town map of Lich-gate. It’s after one when I get to town, so first I have lunch in the Red Brick Cafe, tucked into a corner of the old factory building, and then I buy a map of the area in the card shop down the block.

(I know it would be easier simply to ask directions to Nether Street, but what’s the chance I would be remembered, as the stranger who asked the way to Nether Street just before the murder on Nether Street? Very strong chance, I should think. The idea of seeing myself on TV in an artist’s rendition from eyewitness accounts is not appealing.)

From the name, I would have guessed Nether Street would run along beside the river, that being the lowest part of town, but on the map I see it’s a street that borders the southern city line eastward over to the river. When I drive over there, I see that the hill the town is built on slopes down to the south, this way, and Nether Street got its name because it runs along the base of that hill.

This area is neither suburban nor rural, but an actual town, and this a residential area, old and substantial, the houses mostly a hundred years old, built back when the factory was still turning out whatever it was. They are wide two-story houses on small plots, made mostly of native stone, with generous porches and steep A roofs because of the very snowy winters.

When these houses were built, the managers would have lived here, middle management from the factory, although I don’t think they called it middle management back then. But that’s who they would have been, along with the shop owners and the dentists. A solid comfortable life in a stable neighborhood. None of those people would have believed for a second that the world they lived in was transitional.

264 is like its neighbors, wide and solid and stone. There are no mailboxes out by the roadside here, but mail slots in front doors or small iron mailboxes hung beside the door. The mailman will walk. And the roadside isn’t a roadside, but a curb.

There’s a sidewalk as well, and when I first drive down the block a father is using that sidewalk to teach his scared but game daughter how to ride a two-wheeler. I see them, and I think, Don’t let that be EBD. But in the resumé he described himself as having “three nearly-grown children.”

Most of these houses have garages that were added decades after the houses were built, and most of them are free-standing, beside or behind the house and not attached to it, though here and there, because of those rough winters, people have built enclosed passageways to connect house with garage.

264 has a detached garage, an old-fashioned one with two large doors that open outward, though right now they’re closed. It’s on the right side of the house, and just behind it, with a blacktop driveway that’s crumbling here and there, overdue for a touchup. In the driveway is an orange Toyota Camry, a few years old. No one is visible anywhere around the house.